Technical details

The cloud infrastructures of JINR and its Member State organizations are based on the open source solution OpenNebula. The JINR cloud is the core of this infrastructure. It hosts DIRAC services, which manage computational tasks and data over the resources of JINR and its Member State organizations.

DIRAC (Distributed Infrastructure with Remote Agent Control) INTERWARE is a software framework for distributed computing providing a complete solution to one (or more) user community requiring access to distributed resources. DIRAC builds a layer between the users and the resources offering a common interface to a number of heterogeneous providers, integrating them in a seamless manner, providing interoperability, at the same time as an optimized, transparent and reliable usage of the resources.

The Workload Management System with Pilot Jobs introduced by the DIRAC project is now widely used in various grid infrastructures. This concept allows to aggregate in a single system computing resources of different source and nature, such as computational grids, clouds or clusters, transparently for the end users.

DIRAC provides all the necessary components to build ad-hoc grid infrastructures interconnecting computing resources of different types (computational grids, clouds or clusters), allowing interoperability and simplifying interfaces.

 

 

Software distribution model

Software distribution in the JINR DICE is done via CernVM File System (CVMFS). CVMFS is a web-based, global, and versioning file system optimized for software distribution.  The file system content is installed on a central web server from where it can be mirrored and cached by other web servers and web proxies.  File system clients download data and meta-data on demand and cache them locally. Data integrity and authenticity is ensured by cryptographic hashes and digital signatures.